1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a secret communication method, and more particularly to a secret communication method using numeric data as secret message carrier and having self-authentication capability.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Generally speaking, in the era of network nowadays, various communication methods are highly involved with the Internet. And under circumstances like these, various files, such as text, voices and images, can thus be transmitted via networks.
However, it should be noticed that network communication usually lacks of sufficient security. To solve the problem, prior arts propose to encrypt secret information (i.e. secret message) before it is transmitted. And, the recipient can decrypt the encrypted message to obtain the original information at the receiving side. Nevertheless, although encryption can increase security of information transmission, encrypted data is similar to random code and is likely to be recognized and depredated. Therefore, prior arts further disclose a stegano-technology, which increases information security via hiding secret information into a media carrier to yield a stego-file. After the stego-file is transmitted to the recipient, and the recipient decrypts the stego-file, then the secret information or the secret message can be retrieved. As a result, the stegano-technology nowadays is widely used to reduce the probability of arousing suspicion and the secret information or the secret message being hidden in the media carrier is less likely to be recognized than encrypted information.
A U.S. Pat. No. 7,870,393 disclosed a steganographic method and device, which proposes to use hash codes for verifying the decrypted secret message being retrieved at the receiving side is correct or not. However, such kind of method only determines if the secret message is hacked or destroyed. That is to say, when only a small portion of the secret message is missing while the rest are still transmitted correctly, the conventional method cannot deal with it, but have to abandon the whole secret message.
On account of the above, it should be obvious that there is indeed an urgent need for the professionals in the field to develop a new secret communication method that is capable of having a self-authentication capability. Meanwhile, if any portion of the original message is correct, such portion can be kept and showed even when some portion of the message may have possibly been destroyed. In this way, the above-mentioned problems occurring in the prior design can be solved.